Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Read Free Page B

junk and pinned the boy to the floor.
    Through the slot, they lay nose to nose. The boy squawked and coughed up gouts of something like petroleum jelly. The pliers wiggled against his shoulder. Ether fumes softened the rough edges, so David felt only what he wanted to as he bit into the boy’s face with his remaining teeth. “You want these teeth? Have ‘em, kid, fucking have ‘em!”
    David wept and broke the rest of his fingers without denting the locker, thinking about the empty urn, and Mom’s cancerous private parts in a jar.
    Dad never threw anything away.
    David rolled with the locker as something flipped it over and unbolted it.
    Screaming, “You’re not my mother! You’re not my mom!” he tried to jump out, but she caught him and showed him that, as usual, he was only half right.

The sun beat down just as hard on both sides of the San Ysidro crossing, but something in the dirty sky ate the warm yellow light before it fell on Tijuana. Arid, ionized Santa Ana winds held the coastal breezes at bay and basted the traffic in dust, smog and sweat. In the No. 9 Lane of the Primary Inspection Zone of the San Ysidro Port Of Entry, US Customs Inspector Burt Gillis snorted a line and offered a prayer, to God and science and any Orishas who might be listening, to bless and protect him from the Santero.
    For those waiting to cross into the United States, it was going to be a very long Memorial Day. For Gillis, it felt as if it would last the rest of his life. He had not slept in nearly forty-eight hours, but did not want the day to end, because he knew what the darkness would bring. The Great Night was coming.
    From the iron-fenced compound of the primary inspection pits, Gillis watched the tar-paper and plywood shanties of Colonia Libertad, the most godforsaken slum district in Tijuana, pressing on the border like an invading refugee army in the last days of a siege. Whenever his attention wasn’t demanded elsewhere, he stared at it until his eyes wanted to cry blood, combing the brown shadows for some sign of the one who would be crossing tonight, the one he had to stop.

    Pico told him, last night.
    They sent Gillis home to sleep for a few hours before the insane holiday shift, but he hung around the US short-term lots to meet Pico. At four AM, the lot was still saturated in rusty iodine light and packed with cars. Drunken high school kids fucked or slept in the back seats, squirming pink worms behind fogged-up glass. No one saw them together.
    Pico was Javier’s man on the other side. He received the cars Gillis let through, and distributed to the retailers. Gillis had known him for two years, a lifetime in such work. He had never seen Pico so wired as he was now.
    Gillis zipped up the Padres windbreaker covering his uniform and tugged down his hat. “What happened to Javier? If anything changes, I want to hear it from him.”
    “It is all new, Señor Migra .” Pico chuckled and gagged as he dragged on his cigarette. Pico liked his smokes shermed—dipped in liquid cocaine when times were good, in dry cleaning chemicals when they weren’t. A disgusting habit, it was also a status symbol: he started out with los cementeros —a glue-sniffing gang— so to him, it was swanky.
    It was all the worse to watch because Pico had no lower jaw. Someone smashed it with a brick when he was nine. The meatball doctors at the clinic in Libertad just picked the shards out and sewed him up, so the lower half of his face was a slack pouch of scars.
    Gillis fanned away Pico’s smoke cloud and looked in vain for the pupils in his eyes and wondered how bad things had to get for him to smoke formaldehyde.
    “Señor Javier is no seeing you anymore, but you can see him.” Pico flashed a Polaroid. A badly overexposed shot of plaster walls festooned with red party decorations. In the center stood a battered steel cauldron brimming with a flyblown stew, but Gillis knew what it was in the same instant he realized the red stuff was